. . whereupon he, with his icily boiling Titicaca, let her La Paz bowl be filled up to the top, hissing, bursting, boiling, and overflowing. .
etc., until with these descriptions of their love they had finished a rather complete, universal geography of love as it corresponded to them. Maybe, he thought, everything that is still Utopian today would be able to revolve around them tomorrow with infinities that were already cosmically comprehensible. .
But unexpectedly, something exploded, yes, something crashed into the midst of this narrative, as though tearing it.
Burgmüller asked right away what he had quite typically done wrong again, what had crashed, exploded.
Nothing crashed, nothing exploded, she replied, he hadn’t made the noise, that “tearing sound” to be precise, as she explained; but hadn’t he noticed anything? no? but hadn’t he gotten cooler? no? not that either? he should take a closer look around him.
Then he saw that in the continuation of her love story she had just taken his shirt off him with a single sentence, with a few words she had torn his buttons off with quick dexterity, almost like an assault: he thought he heard his distraught shirtsleeves, pulled to pieces, like fluttering scarecrow wings that had learned to fly, now lamenting as they ran aground in the farthest corner of the room.
He wasn’t as quick as she was, and didn’t want to be, but he didn’t keep her waiting long for a very sensitive, extensive description of the exceptionally complicated pattern of the material of her blouse, with his very special preference for certain parts of the awesome sight of its material, which she understood in no uncertain terms because of the exceptional care he took to be so precise.
Was that all right with her, he asked by the way, yes, that was all right with her, she wanted him to tell her very exactly and completely all the further measures he wished to take regarding her, everything that occurred to him to want to do with her, though of course she rather suspected what other things he would still want both from her and with her, yes, but he shouldn’t leave out a single word, she was exceptionally interested in what he thought he wanted from her; (then she would add to that by telling him exactly what could still be wanted so very much from her, so that he would soon want that too. .)
Suddenly he felt himself penetrated by her heart, and embraced by it, although, as before, it was only his words that were learning to advance ever farther toward her with the continuing seductive beauty of his sentences, by which she thought she felt entirely fulfilled, because the plots of the love stories they dedicated to each other, piled high, broke up into almost feverishly flowing sentences that sprayed into the atmosphere around them like the lost parts of a legendary myth that remained unknown and not even imaginable, so that they held their breath, or was it mainly the sunshine of the daylight leaning into the room toward them, which was ground into wood shavings and shaken out of the bulbous sacks of this region that were filled to bursting?
As if “myth-sick” Burgmüller was able, in distinguished depravity, to have sentences of ornate sparseness glide through his head, which sounded something like this: Tomorrow, the unbound Prometheus will go on a great holiday with the woman who has suddenly surfaced, the liberator of his love. Accompanied by the satiric pathos of a comedy full of self-mockery, he suddenly seemed a little witty even to himself during this thunderstorm in the heat of the night that was blinking around so vainly with its cobalt shimmer, though its weatherproof cape was riddled with holes.
After they got back, Burgmüller thought, the two of them would start their public performances of nature-music concerts by directing flocks of birds through the air, sky concerts above the city, and he thought of people he would consider involving as collaborators, such as Schleifer and Schläfer, the two indestructibly dissolute virtuosi, not Pfeifer, no, not Pfeifer, Comelli of course, maybe Jagusch too, and Jacksch, no, not Jacksch, but then it would also be better to do without Jagusch too, and instead of them, he’d involve Hellberger, Keldorfer, Schwarzkopf, and Diabelli. Pfeifer could write whatever he wanted about it in the newspaper, and maybe Jagusch wouldn’t be all that bad after all, and he could certainly do more with Jacksch than people had previously thought possible. .
~ ~ ~
When he woke up the next morning, she was already gone.
They hadn’t intended to leave until midday, because a few days before this she had received a letter, an official or semi-official document containing the inviting request that she show up without fail on this day for a fixed appointment to discuss something of an urgency that wasn’t clearly defined, but was to take place in an exactly designated room of a very particular public building.
Why had she taken all her luggage along to the office — hadn’t he offered to take her things to the train station too, to speed the process up for her and so make that visit as easy as possible?
Had she forgotten his offer this morning, because she felt she had to hurry — or had she suddenly thought she would somehow suffer a loss of dignity if she let anyone else, including him, carry anything for her?
A warm morning lay spread out on the square in front of the train station, and in spite of the silent sultriness of its breath, it alleviated the boredom of the neglected pay phones by using merrily trembling, glittering dust cloths of air and cleaning rags of light to quickly wipe down their receivers and polish them to a shine.
The train the two of them were supposed to take later on had been waiting patiently for them since the early morning, standing ready at the platform in the main hall of the train station. The train station personnel used massive sledgehammers to hit the cars in the intestines, to test the durability of their various hoses to see if they had sprung leaks on the last trip, or would soon on the coming trip.
How good that he had ordered their tickets far enough in advance and had already picked them up, because, back then, behind the individual wickets for pre-purchasing tickets in the entrance hall the officials were trying to sell all that remained in the way of trips, open seats, and reserved seats on the trains that would still be leaving on that day, they made every effort to lure the members of the public who were in the train station over to their wickets, to show the people the beautifully colored train tickets, which they held up in the air so they were clearly visible, yes, and sometimes one or the other of them went so far in his zeal as to leave his cubicle to go up to a gentleman or a lady in a very familiar fashion, to convince the passerby he had personally addressed to please come back with him to his respective wicket, helping the person along a little now and then with a hand motion, gently pushing, or, if necessary, if someone was simply too equivocal, grabbing the person helpfully by the arm or simply taking him or her by the hand back to the wicket in question, where the convincing advantages of traveling off on the very same day were immediately impressed on the passerby in no uncertain terms; until, because of these efforts, the urge to travel had increased to such an extent in the train station that long lines formed, full of tightly-packed people, all of whom wanted to travel away immediately, but unfortunately there weren’t enough tickets anymore, which is why, as the people who were pressing more and more forcefully toward the wickets began to be pushed aside — and some of them were already entirely wedged together — there would almost have been a massive fistfight over the remaining trips, if the ticket agents, after selling their very last tickets, had not fortunately stormed out of their wickets and immediately, with calming words, spoken soothingly to the remaining people, tangled up with each other, disappointed, in need of travel, unsatisfied, the ticket agents helpfully pushed the remaining people apart with their hands, consoling them on that day in the train station hall, back then, by telling the crowd about the even more advantageous offers there would be tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and as a closing tonic for the very last of the people who always remain sitting in vain in the waiting rooms, they recited by heart the poetic litanies of all the train schedules, complete to the last detail, several times, as a means of saying farewell.